Perception, Execution, Accumulation

There are two dominant themes that form the foundation for this approach.  The first we have already briefly covered, that you create the market that you experience in your own mind based on your beliefs, perceptions, intents, and rules. And, second, your trading results will be a function of the degree of skills you develop in three primary areas: perception, or your ability to perceive opportunity; execution, or your ability to execute a trade; and accumulation, or your ability to allow your account balance to grow over a period of time or series of trades.

EXECUTING YOUR TRADES

Your ability to execute your trades is a function of the amount of fear you generate or the lack of it. Fear is always the result of your beliefs about the threatening nature of the environment. What could be threatening about the market? Nothing, if you had the confidence and completely trusted

yourself to act appropriately under any given set of market conditions. Essentially, what you fear is not the markets but rather your inability to do what you need to do, when you need to do it, without hesitation

In your relationship with the markets you had to learn what to fear. What you learned to fear was a result of whatever you did that caused pain. Your pain was the result of your not knowing what to do next that resulted in an outcome you neither expected nor intended. In the market environment you are free to act or not to act; the markets cannot do anything to you that you don't allow, even if it is out of ignorance or a complete sense of powerlessness.

The effects of fear on one's behavior are obvious, limiting one to the point of complete immobility. If you can't execute your trades properly, even when you perceive the most perfect opportunity, it is because you have not released yourself from the pain contained in the memories of past trading experiences and because you still don't trust yourself to act appropriately in any given set of conditions. If you did, there would be no fear or immobility.

ACCUMULATING PROFITS

Your degree of self-valuation will regulate how much money you will give yourself (the market doesn't give you the money, you give it to yourself based on your ability to perceive opportunity and execute a trade) out of the maximum potential available or perceivable at any given moment or time frame perspective. Regardless of the depth of understanding you have of market behavior or what you consciously intend, you will only "give" yourself the amount of money that corresponds to your level of selfvaluation. This concept can be explained with a simple illustration. If you perceive an opportunity, based on your definition or what market conditions constitute an opportunity, and do not follow through by executing a trade, what stopped you? In my mind, there can be only two possible reasons. You were either immobilized by the fear of failure or you are struggling with a belief (value) system that says you don't deserve the money. Otherwise, you would have acted on your perception.

SELF-ACCEPTANCE

The second theme that provides a foundation for the belief system I am offering is that personal transformation, growth, and learning new skills are a function of self-acceptance. Your intent of learning a new skill or way of expressing yourself is in essence an attempt to create a new dimension of yourself. It is a goal you have projected out into the future that you will then attempt to fulfill by growing into it. The market will quite naturally make you face what is inside of you on a moment-to-moment basis. What is inside of you could be confidence or fear, a perception of opportunity or loss, restraint or uncontrollable greed, objectivity or illusion. The market just reflects these mental conditions, it does not create them. Therefore, to grow into a new expression of yourself (fulfill your goal of being a more successful trader), you will need to learn how to accept the existence of any of these negative mental conditions and the psychological components that create them. Cultivating a belief in accepting whatever you find inside of yourself will give you the base you need to work from to change these conditions.

STUFF

What I intend to demonstrate in the following chapters is even thoughyou cannot turn your eyes inward to actually see these mental componentparts of the mental environment, it doesn't make them any less real. Besides,it isn't necessary to turn our eyes inward because we can just as easily learn to define what is inside of our mental environment by what we see and experience in the outside physical environment. By making the connection between what we believe and what we experience, it will be a lot easier to change what we experience by learning how to manipulate our beliefs. We will examine the nature of beliefs and how they act as environmental information management systems. I will demonstrate how our individual beliefs about the nature of the market, and our expectations of what it will do next, manage and control the type and quality of information we perceive about it. By breaking down the dynamics of perception, you will be able to identify the various ways in which all of us place mental limitations on the market's behavior and how these limitations cause us to distort market information. We will thoroughly explore the nature of fear and how it compels all of us to act without a perception of choice. The predominate underlying force behind most traders' actions causing prices to move is fear—the fear of missing out (competing for the supply) and the fear of loss. If you really want to understand the market's behavior to anticipate what it will do next, then you will first have to learn about and understand the underlying forces beneath your own behavior and how you process and manage information. When you understand how any number of typical market-related fears operate in your life and learn to release yourself from them, you will, in effect, be separating yourself from the "crowd." When you separate yourself from the "crowd" and expand what you know about the forces affecting your behavior to encompass the group, it will be much easier to anticipate what the group will do because they will merely represent a larger (collective) version of the way you used to be. In other words, you will know how other traders will behave before they do because you will be able to observe them from a detached perspective—due to your having evolved beyond the choiceless state of operating out of fear.